“Hey, Leebie, hello,” he said with pleasant surprise. “You’re home early.”

Leebie’s surprise was a lot less pleasant. “Amram!” she cried, knuckles white around the doorknob. “You scared me!”

“Ooh, sorry. I didn’t know you were here. I just came home from Grunners’ with this case of jelly rings and was packing it away. Damaged printing — I figured the kids would love the treat.”

Of course they would. Which kid didn’t like jelly rings? She eyed the boxes with a strange sourness.

“Are you looking for something here?” Amram asked.

“Uh, no,” she said hastily. “I mean, yes. Nine-inch plates. For upstairs.”

“I took up a new package last night.”

“Oh. Yeah, thanks. And uh, the cats. We need to do something about them. This lady doesn’t listen when we talk to her. Can you, like, call 311?”

“Leebie?”

“Yes?”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. There were two cats on the stairs when I got home. I hate cats.”

“Right.” He took another box of jelly rings out of the carton and positioned it on the shelf. Then he looked at Leebie pointedly. “What did Ita say?”

On the top shelf on the far right of the garage, Leebie could make out the ‘Miscellaneous’ bin that held her piercing gun. That little device could help resolve this whole mess. If only Amram wouldn’t ask so many questions, she could do her thing.

She took a few steps toward Pinchas’s old bike and balanced her weight on the seat. “Ita is Ita,” she said, as smoothly as possible. “She tells you what she wants you to hear, so it hardly matters what she says.”

Sure, because Amram would totally accept that and move on.

“Leebie,” he said firmly, “we need to act like menschen. We can’t let the Manns think we went back on a promise we never made. Tell me what she said.”

Leebie rolled her foot over the bike’s pedal. She wasn’t going to lie; she couldn’t. “The Manns don’t think that way. They… Ita says she explained it to them very nicely. They understood.”

Ita had explained it to them. Originally, before the shidduch, and all wrong. Ugh, lying was so ugh.

Amram aligned the stack of jelly ring boxes neatly. “Are they malachim?” he asked, incredulous.

The discomfort was making Leebie choke. “Apparently,” she muttered.

“Unbelievable.” He picked up the empty carton, turned it over, and ripped the tape off the bottom. “Well, either Ita is lying, or the Manns are even more special people than we ever realized. Either way, I’m going to talk to Shaul Mann. I know I didn’t do anything wrong, but he’s being so gracious about this, I should at least apologize for the misunderstanding. And I’ll also explain that we aren’t leaving the couple in the lurch. I’m working to find an excellent job for Yehudis — there’s one offer that looks very promising, actually, at a mortgage company. That’s a lot more helpful than money, because I’m teaching the couple fiscal responsibility.”

The boxes, bottles, and bins on the shelves around her swayed before her eyes. Her throat felt tight, the words she wished to scream clogging her airway. No, please, please don’t.

He couldn’t talk to Shaul Mann. He couldn’t, there was no way.

Gripping the bike’s handles, Leebie watched Amram fold up the empty jelly ring carton and hitch it under his arm. The resoluteness of his movements made her sick to the stomach.

She didn’t bother trying to dissuade him. If Amram said he would talk to their mechutan, that’s exactly what he was going to do.

O

kay, banks were clear proof that she’d done it: Yehudis was an adult now.

So why didn’t she feel like one? Why did her toes tingle with apprehension as she stood in front of the Chase building waiting for Sruly?

As she watched the security guard at the door nod to people who entered and left, the panic rose. Everyone seemed to be briskly going about their business, as though banking was just one of the myriad tasks in the daily grind, and it probably was, for all those people.

I should’ve asked my father to join us, just this once.

Sruly hadn’t sounded anxious about this trip. He’d made the plan to meet her there during his lunch break all casually, as though it was some pleasure outing. Would he know what to do and say? She hoped so, because she definitely wouldn’t. Her father had taken care of all this banking stuff for her until her wedding, and she wouldn’t even know how to fill out a deposit slip.

It wasn’t only the big, cold bank that filled her with dread. The idea of owning her own credit card frightened her. She’d never bought a dozen eggs in her life before running it by her father, because he always knew which groceries had the best prices, and, well, she didn’t, and how do you learn this skill?

She checked the time on the phone. Sruly should’ve been here already. She went to her recent calls and selected My Better Half.

The call went straight to voicemail, and a moment later, Sruly texted her. Be there in two.

When he showed up — not two minutes later, but seven — he was holding a bag with two iced lattes and wearing the oddest expression on his face. “So sorry I’m late. My father called. Something super weird is going on.”

There was something alarming in his voice, a mixture of confusion and was it… accusation? Yehudis’s mouth went dry. “What happened?”

“Let’s talk inside.”

She’d never seen him this way. The clipped, curt tone of voice. The tightness of his mouth. It terrified her.

He pushed open the door to the bank, as thoughtlessly as he would push open the door to a grocery. Even through her trepidation, Yehudis marveled at this and followed him uneasily.

The overly cooled air crept through her bones, and for a moment Yehudis forgot about her husband’s ominous behavior as she shrank in fear of the ominous walls. But while she stood in the entryway, completely lost, Sruly swiftly approached a bank worker, conversed with him for a minute, then motioned Yehudis to follow him to the cubicles over on the side.

How did he know to go there and not get on the line for the bank tellers? Had he even been in a bank ever before in his life?

She was still mulling over this when Sruly settled into a chair facing an empty desk. She sat down on the next chair gingerly. “The clerk will be here in a few minutes,” Sruly said. He put down the bag with the drinks on a corner of the desk, and Yehudis automatically tensed.

“What did you start telling me about your father?” she asked.

“About your father, actually.”

She blinked in surprise. “My father? What about him?”

“So he called my father last night. He was all sorry about the rent story, describing epes a whole mix-up or something? He kept talking about a mistake, about not breaking promises, or maybe not making promises? I’m not sure. I mamesh have no idea what he meant, but I think my father understood that maybe something happened. Like, maybe your parents aren’t able to come through with the support arrangement like the original plan. I don’t know… I told him we got the rent money for June, so I’m not sure what he means. Now my father’s feeling all bad. He got the picture that there’s some… uh, parnassah issue going on. I didn’t know what to tell him, because I really don’t know.”

He squinted at Yehudis, and she picked up his unasked questions. Was there something going on? Did she know anything?

No, she didn’t know what was going on, but she did know something else. She knew that her parents’ refusal to commit to support had stood in the way of almost every shidduch that had come up for her. She knew that support had not been a condition of her shidduch with Sruly, and she knew what a relief that had been. And now this whole… thing. Something definitely was going on. Something very strange.

Yehudis tugged the sleeves of her top down over her palms. “I… don’t know,” she stammered. “That really is weird. Uh, I’m not aware of any parnassah issues. At least, my parents didn’t tell me anything….”

“Your father also discussed a new job you’re starting, something very well paying.” He tapped the desk in a quick rhythm, then looked at her pointedly. “Are you starting a new job?”

“I— he didn’t….”

He didn’t mean the promotion to eighth grade. He’d made his position against that patently clear.

This conversation was making her dizzy. But before she had a chance to try to make sense of everything Sruly was saying, the bank clerk entered the cubicle and their conversation was cut short.

“Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Nick Burlington.” The clerk was a very young man wearing a black shirt and black pants, with his name engraved on a copper name tag. He extended his hand to Sruly and nodded at Yehudis.

Yehudis sat stiffly as Nick took a seat on the other side of the desk and looked up at them through his university student glasses. “So! You guys just got married? Congratulations. And I gather we’re going to open a bank account today, right? Okay, let’s get you guys started.”

His voice was smooth as he outlined their options for checking and savings accounts, and, based on Sruly’s easy responses, the process seemed straightforward. But Yehudis could barely manage to provide her date of birth and scribble her signature.

Her father wasn’t struggling with parnassah, she really didn’t think so. At least not any more than he’d ever struggled before. Sruly didn’t know this, but there had never been any support commitment. Her father couldn’t break a promise he never made.

Her mind fell into a haze of clicking keyboards, muted voices, and the echo of Sruly’s words, and she felt a headache come on. She understood Sruly’s bewilderment. He was entitled to know what was going on. But she couldn’t explain anything, not to him, not to herself. She hated this, hated the yucky awkwardness.

But what could she tell him? If he was bewildered, she was seized by fear. What had her father wanted from her father-in-law? What was this whole mix-up story?

And bottom line: Were her parents going to pay half of the rent again next month — or not?

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 925)